The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to event processing and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to events and derived events in event processing systems and/or applications.
During the last years, event processing has become a common infrastructure for real-time applications which require processing of data streams, such as electronic trading systems, and network monitoring. Event processing systems are capable of detecting complex situations (a context-sensitive composition of messages and events), rather than single events. The functionality is applicable when processing a composition of event sources from a business, application, or infrastructure perspective within different contexts. Sample scenarios relating to SLA alerts and compliance checking are applicable to retail and banking Experience shows that there are utilization barriers in the development of event processing systems within the current state of the practice technology. One of these utilization barriers is the fact that in many cases it is difficult to create applications that are consistent with the requirements and intuition of the users, especially as it relates to the notion of time; on one hand, processing is done within the physical time of the system, on the other hand, events may come with their own logical occurrence time. This problem becomes even more acute when dealing with the processing of derived events (events that are derived by event processing agents (EPA) within the event processing system). This phenomenon either leads to incorrect outcomes in some cases, or leads to hacking work around these issues for a particular event processing system or application.